The first thing to say about the Kanye West/Wireless Festival affair is that it’s not as bad as it may initially appear.
It’s much, much worse.
One approaches it as an amateur firefighter equipped with a kitchen extinguisher might do acres of blazing landfill. Where to start?
Perhaps with the managing director of the festival itself, one Melvin Benn, whose pigeon this is. Mr Benn – presumably after visiting a fancy-dress shop, then emerging through a magic door, costumed as a clown – presided over the decision to book Mr West to headline three successive days at the now cancelled London event. Which was nothing if not ambitious. Even Mr West’s former idol, Adolf Hitler, deigned to top the bill only on the final night of any given Nuremberg rally.
In case anyone is unaware of the background to the controversy… but let’s pause for a moment on the word “controversy”. That there should be a controversy, that anyone who is not a card-carrying Nazi should have thought for a nanosecond there was anything here to argue over, tells you exactly how deep and rotten a mess we are in.
Mr West, in 2023, having promised to go “death con 3 On Jewish people”, appeared on a far-right podcast to praise Adolf Hitler.
After which he recanted. He apologised to Jews, and asked for forgiveness.
Then he did it again. Only, somehow, worse. In February 2025, he started selling swastika t-shirts, followed in May by the release of a song titled Heil Hitler. This duly led to another apology, in January of this year. Mr West – “Ye” to his admirers, including Mr Benn – again disavowed Nazism and antisemitism, blaming his actions on a bipolar disorder. He again announced his intention to learn and change.
Sceptics responded by saying, in effect, “mental illness doesn’t do that!” But this is not certain. Mental illness could well do that. Sufferers often battle terrifying imaginary demons which to them are all too real. What is revealing is the identity of the first demons who rushed to Mr West’s troubled mind. Mental illness neither explains nor excuses that.
Eventually the Home Office barred Mr West from entering the UK, which put the tin hat on the whole debacle. The sundry defences presented by Mr Benn are worth revisiting, however. Didn’t “Ye” deserve “a second chance”? Perhaps – although this would have been more like a seventh or eighth. But he needed to earn it. At least he had taken the first step – albeit repeatedly required – of acknowledging he was wrong, which is more than most Jew-baiters ever will. Thus far, that was all. The phrase “too soon” might have been coined for this very situation. Go away. Keep quiet. Do the work. Show solid, lasting progress. Then we’ll see.
Couldn’t we, pleaded Mr Benn, be more understanding of those suffering from mental illness? We could, and frequently should. Apparently, such understanding does not extend to those whom a mentally ill person has caused unspeakable, unrepaired harm. They can suck it up. There are tickets to sell.
“Multiple stakeholders were consulted in advance of booking Ye and no concerns were highlighted at the time.” You might wonder if here Mr Benn is being disingenuous, but I fear something more troubling still: that he is telling the truth. This would imply: (1) the sponsors who subsequently bailed on the festival saw nothing amiss with the booking; and (2) it occurred to absolutely nobody at Festival Republic, the company behind Wireless, that under the circumstances – let’s recap; selling swastika shirts, proclaiming “Heil Hitler” – British Jewry, or any of its mainstream representatives, might constitute a stakeholder.
Perhaps Mr Benn relied upon his own expertise there. After all, he had “for many months in the 1970s” lived on a kibbutz. Which, as bogus credentialism goes, lands somewhere between “My parents were at Cable Street” and “I once ate a really good bagel”. Even if Mr Benn were himself as Jewish as lox and a schmear – for all I know he could be a distant cousin who has shed two letters from the family name – it would in no way alter what actually happened. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a Jewish face, while its owner indignantly insists his “anti-racist” or “anti-fascist” ideals make it impossible for him to do such a thing – for ever.
Mr Benn concluded with an appeal for “forgiveness… in a divisive world”. There is something in that. Yet forgiveness is the prerogative of the victim, in the victim’s own time. It cannot be commanded or coerced from without, to suit the interests of a contrite culprit – or of those who aim to profit from him, at once sighing with righteous sorrow and bristling with impatient self-entitlement. Look, the grotesque hate was last year. He said he was sorry. Are you people never satisfied?
It is a curious irony that of only one people on Earth is it demanded they must at all times behave with perfect Christian charity – and that is the Jews.
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